Not for me, but perhaps it's for thee.

MBunge

After watching this film, I checked over the DVD features and found a text piece that described the work of filmmaker Kelly Reichardt as "art with profound ambitions on a human scale". Well, I don't know about what else Reichardt has done but you'd have to be one pretentious, ivory tower-livin' mofo to describe Wendy and Lucy as "profoundly ambitious". This is a very quiet, very slow, very naturalistic and extremely minimalistic 80 minutes of storytelling which eschews any sort of ambition, artistically or as entertainment. It's not poorly made and I suppose you could call it a success at what it's apparently trying to do. That purpose, though, has nothing to do with engaging the audience in any real way except to exploit the sentiments of dog lovers.

Wendy (Michelle Williams) is a young woman making her way to Alaska for work, joined by her dog Lucy (Lucy the dog). Her POS car breaks down in an Oregon town and then Lucy goes missing, so Wendy spends the rest of the movie looking for her dog and trying to get the car fixed. Neither ends happily. The end.

You may think I'm leaving something out of that synopsis but I'm really not. Reichardt's slice-of-life production simply follows this young woman along for a couple of days as she hangs onto the last rung of the economic ladder. Wendy does a lot of walking. She cleans herself in a convenience store bathroom. She makes a bed in the woods out of old sheets of cardboard. She befriends a Walgreen's parking lot security guard. And that's about it. We never know enough about Wendy to care about her for anything other than her missing dog. Nobody says very much. Nothing all that dramatic or comedic happens.

If you hate dogs, you'll be bored out of your freakin' mind by this film. Unless you've lived a life that is totally insulated from the realities of working class existence in America and can view Wendy and Lucy as a cinematic safari into that environment, you'll be bored out of your freakin' mind by this film. Even fans of the lovely and talented Michelle Williams will be bored by this thing because she does little besides look forlorn, with about 30 seconds of abject misery thrown in.

I mean, there's just nothing to this. The story is practically stillborn. The dialog is forgettable. The camera work is static and uneventful. Honestly, the majority of Wendy and Lucy feels like the deleted scenes that get cut out of a movie because they don't go anywhere or contribute anything to the story. Now, if this is the sort of thing you like, that's all well and good for you. Go ahead and wallow in the uninspired normality of it. But while I don't demand that every movie I watch have laser battles, topless chicks, kicks to the groin and a guy walking away as something explodes behind him, I do need more than what this motion picture is willing to give.

This is not ambitious. This is small and limited and indifferent to anything outside of its narrow imagination. It would have been hard enough to sit through this as a 20 minute film festival entry. At four times that length, I'd bet most people never make it through Wendy and Lucy and I don't think they miss anything.

score 5/10

MBunge 29 May 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2618573/